The misunderstanding about motivation

I recently started to notice something very pleasant. As I’m performing more and more magic, the magic becomes more and more human. Back in the day when I got hired for gigs, I used to be like a machinegun firing magical effects at people.

Recently I started to have more conversations with the people I perform for. This is very pleasant for me as I can share my intentions and it is very interesting for the audience as they rarely get the chance to talk with a magician.

One subject that comes up a lot is the subject of practice. A usual questions is “How much time a day do you spend on magic”, on which I usually answer “I practice between 3 and 8 hours a day. But, I think about it 24/7”. People always act surprised when they hear the number of practice hours I make and even other magicians praise the amount of hours from time to time.

I came to the discovery however, that we have a big misunderstanding about motivation.

“I can’t get my self to do it” is on that comes back a lot. The strange thing is tough. We love to do magic, yet we can’t get ourselves to practice?

I heard the same thing from Darwin Ortiz and his solution was to just start practicing magic even if you don’t feel like it. When you start it will be fun and time flies.

Even tough the above method works, it usually takes a lot of effort and makes us very tired because we’re resisting starting to practice.

What do I mean by this?

Resisting starting to practice.

I mean that our mind really doesn’t want to do it because, we tell ourselves that we should do it.

To give you a clear context: think back to when you were a little kid. Whenever your mom or dad told you to do something. Certainly you didn’t want to do it anymore. Even if it was something that you would’ve enjoyed otherwise.

The nature of our mind is just that we don’t like to be told what to do. This also implies telling ourselves what to do.

Whenever something is effortless and usually fun, we just do it. That’s the trick, don’t tell yourself that you have to practice. You are already practicing.

Tell yourself “I’m practicing”. This always true. It doesn’t mean that you have to practice in that moment. But, it means that the actions that you take lead up to you practicing.

A good example in the English language is “I’m seeing someone” this is something that we usually say when we are dating with someone. This doesn’t mean that we are seeing the person right now in the moment, it means that the things that we do in that day or week lead up to us seeing that person again.